Hand Me Down World (29 page)

Jermayne was suspicious. Just a few weeks earlier I had no money and I was begging him to see the boy. Now I had money and I was as calm as a face in a passing tram window. What had happened? I told him I had a position at a hotel. Jermayne seemed happy with that explanation. It made sense. What else would I do? The world was back to working order. ‘What about your ridiculous friend?' he asked. I told him I hadn't seen him. I'd taken Jermayne at his word and not gone back to Bernard's hole-in-the-wall neighbourhood.

‘Good,' he said. ‘Maybe you're not as stupid as you look.'

I continued to visit my little Frenchman, but never during the day, always at night, and at an hour when the lights were out at Jermayne's. I know because I always checked before continuing on over the bridge into Bernard's neighbourhood. No matter how comfortable my life was, it didn't give me what Bernard did, which was a devotion. I felt it in his hands and in his breath when I lay down next to him in the dark. When it was time to go he wouldn't come further than the hole in the wall just in case Jermayne was waiting to pounce on him outside. He wasn't afraid of Jermayne, but he took his threats seriously, as I did. Bernard did not want to see me lose the chance to see my boy. He liked to say I had turned myself into a shooting star. He would look up in the dark and there I was. The next night he'd look up and in the same dark space between his head and the rafters he couldn't find a trace of me.

The other reason for sneaking back to Bernard's neighbourhood was so I could get the football.

And now, in the warm afternoons of early summer, we kicked the ball back and forth as we'd done when we were still two unknown islands seeking connection.

There was another change. Abebi was working different hours. So these days we met by the bronze lions at the bottom of the Tiergarten. Jermayne was feeling more secure because now he left us alone. I could do whatever I pleased with the boy, but always it had to involve the ball. Even when we went for a walk we had to do so kicking the ball back and forth to each other, until I came to think of it as a ball and chain like I'd seen in a film starring George Clooney on television at the Four Seasons. They break the chain, I forget how, and end up singing songs at a radio station.

One afternoon in Tiergarten some barefoot white minstrels wandered across the grass blowing flutes. The boy trapped the ball. He looked up, then he picked up the ball and placed his hand in mine. I don't know what it was about those barefoot minstrels that made him afraid, but I am glad they came along when they did. For the rest of the hour, hand in hand, we walked the paths and beneath the trees and across the grass. I bought the boy an ice cream. I saw other mothers with children floating plastic boats on the ponds and thought,
that's how we must look too
, like the most natural thing in the world.

Whenever I need to persuade myself that there was once a time when I belonged in the world this is the afternoon I return to. The boats on the ponds. The boy's hand in mind. His other hand gripped the cone, his happy eyes looking up over that white hill of ice cream.

My life as a normal person continued throughout the summer. I could notice a green police van without turning away and looking for a place to hide. On my time off I looked in the shop windows and saw clothes I would like to buy for the boy. Shoes and shirts. But, I thought, I would hate the day to come when I had no money to buy time to see the boy and at the same time know that I had wasted fifty euros on clothes he didn't need. As far as I could tell he did not go without. In any case it was a stupid fantasy. Jermayne would need to support it and tell Abebi that he had bought the clothes and then the boy would have to be sworn to silence.

Bernard was curious to know about the old gentleman, what he looked like. He wanted to hear about the conversations, what the gentleman said and what I said. Well, I did not have much to say. Since the old gentleman had opinions on everything. He knew about everything. When we walked out in the world with his arm through mine we walked no faster than what allowed him to talk. He did ask me questions about myself. Where I was born. How I came to live in Italy. Once he asked me if I had ever been on an airplane. I replied honestly, ‘No.' Just then I pointed to a squirrel that ran across our path. For a few minutes he talked about squirrels and how the squirrel population had suffered during the war. Then I pointed up at the white vapour trail of a plane. He raised his face, out of habit I suppose, and looked lost. He talked about a cruise ship he'd been on, and the strangeness of swimming in pools of water far out to sea. He asked if I had ever been on a ship. ‘No,' I said. I had replied honestly and without seeing how talk and words could lay down snares. Snare is a word Bernard taught me. The next ten minutes were uncomfortable. The old gentleman stopped talking. The conversation we just had still rung in our ears as we walked on. His arm looped through mine and yet I had the feeling the more nothing was said the more we seemed to be walking apart from one another.

I had been caught out. Now the story told by the pastor had a crack in it. So did his trust in me. On our walks he did not speak so freely as he had. When we visited the zoo he asked to be led to the birdcages, and there he would ask me to describe a bird. It was a game he'd invented. He had to guess the name of the bird from my description. But my description was the problem. My English was not as good as the gentleman's. When I said a bird had a red chest he would ask me to refine red. Red came in many varieties, he said. As many varieties as there are birds. And so I would have to rack my brain to come up with something else that captured perfectly the red of the feathers. I was no good at this game and soon we stopped playing it. Then we stopped going to the zoo. We walked in the park and we sat down on the bench without anything to say. We needed a football. We needed something.

That something turned out to be the feel of my skin under the gentleman's blind eye.

We are back to Ramona's preoccupation—of finding out how far I would go in order to carry on seeing my boy.

One night after I had cleared the dishes away I sat with the gentleman. I asked him what it was like to be around someone he couldn't see. ‘Like being round ghosts,' he said. ‘You hear the voice, but don't see the body. Take yourself,' he said. ‘I have no idea what you look like.'

So, hearing that, I drew up the chair next to his at the table. I reached for his hand and I laid it against my face. His fingers began to walk softly across my skin. He stroked the bridge of my nose with his finger. He brushed my lips with his finger. He rose in his chair and eased down again and made a sigh, a croaking to life or a dying, I couldn't decide. I had beautiful skin, he said. ‘Good God,' he said. Good God. His fingers wandered up to my eyes. The tip of a finger drew a circle around one eye, then the other. Bit by bit of me fell to his wandering fingers. I undid my uniform. I undid the bra I'd stolen from the Englishwoman. His fingers wandered and here and there they paused to catch their breath the way tourists do on a walk to take in the view. I wanted to be a special view that he could not do without. I wanted to keep my room. I needed the housekeeping money and what he paid me to pay to see the boy. So I had to be a beautiful view. The gentleman was standing up now, craning over me.

That night I left the blind gentleman fast asleep. I went back to my room. I sat on the edge of the bed. I thought, I could steal the boy and keep him in the room with me. The blind gentleman would never know. I will teach the boy to turn himself into a ghost.

The next night I am in bed when I hear the blind gentleman at the door. As the old man came in the idea of the ghost boy went out.

The following night I heard him clawing at the door, and the night after, and then I began to lie there awake and expect him. And when he didn't turn up I was angry I had stayed awake for nothing.

One night he knelt by the bed and licked me from head to toe. Then he turned me over and licked me from my neck down my back between my legs, the backs of my legs, then he turned me over and licked again, went on licking me like a cat. For the third time he rolled me over onto my back. This time he moved my knees apart and entered me. And I wanted him to.

Now the days were easier. When we went out for a walk the blind gentleman put his arm through mine and held me close. When we sat in the park the silences were no longer a problem. The blind gentleman was like a child with its favourite soft toy.

Towards the end of summer those bad old silences returned. He would talk about his wife. He would talk about the things they used to do together, he could recall entire conversations, and what interesting conversations they were, on things which I knew nothing about. I began to worry again. Every child grows out of his soft toy.

I didn't know there was a room on the next landing until he asked me if I would object to another live-in companion. The person wouldn't be on top of us. He or she, he said, would live in the room on the next landing. For a few afternoons a week the new live-in companion would give me a break. What did I think about that? When I didn't answer quickly he said that, of course, I would have to choose the person on his behalf. It would be my choice, but he didn't want any young men. It would be inappropriate. Young men, he said, were generally untrustworthy. An older man, yes, perhaps, why not? Another younger woman? Yes, possibly. But it would need to be someone around whom I felt comfortable.

thirty-two

The man the blind gentleman called Defoe irritated me. He thought of the world as a child does—as a place to play. He was like a tourist. He was always searching for something new to stare at.

I don't know anything about the world he comes from. He would drink all night with the blind gentleman. Sometimes he would try to help in the kitchen. Often he ate in a rush, then he'd sit there, his arms folded, while he waited for me and the blind gentleman to finish our plates. When he ate like that he would be wanting to get back downstairs to his fossils.

The first time we all went to the zoo they forgot I was there. They forgot the flamingos and the seals. A giraffe could have come and sat down beside them and they would not have noticed because they were too busy talking about other animals—not the ones in the zoo—but lungfish and, in the blind gentleman's case, butterflies. I don't know why they felt they had to go to the zoo to have that conversation. In their talk I saw my own shortcomings. In Defoe's company the blind gentleman talked in a way that he never did with me.

For a few weeks I felt threatened. If I lost my position I would have to go back to the railway station.

Bernard talked some calm into me. He made me see myself the way the blind gentleman might see me, and then straightaway I saw my uses. I kept the apartment clean. Defoe couldn't do that. His own room was a mess. I made coffee and tea for the gentleman, I brought him schnapps. I cooked for him until he got sick of what I made and after that came into the kitchen to talk me through the cooking of the things he wanted to eat—meals that required certain ingredients which, if I couldn't steal them, we could not really afford because money spent on a special ingredient could have been money spent on seeing my boy. What else? I was company. I didn't tell Bernard what kind of company I was. Nor did I tell him—or Defoe—about the photograph.

We had to wait until Defoe had left for the museum, then the gentleman would ask me to bring him the photograph. It was kept in a special place. Of course I knew where. In the gentleman's office I would sit down and describe the photograph.

The first time I thought I was looking at white slugs. But then I saw what those white slugs were. Some of the women are dead. But not all of them. Some of the women are curled up as they wait for the bullet that will end their lives. One woman lay on her front. I cannot forget her. She is raised onto her elbows like a sunbather at the beach, as her executioners approach from the rear, one man with a pistol, the other with a rifle.

The gentleman asked the same questions as he did at the zoo. What did the women look like? And I would have to look carefully to find the birthmarks, the hair, and the heaviness or thinness of the torso. He had given each woman a name. The ones that were still alive, that is. That way, he said, they could not be mistaken for the garden slugs that I had seen the first time. The one he liked described the most was the sunbather. He wanted to hear about her flesh. How firm it was, and I told him until, to my ears, it sounded like I was describing meat in a shop window.

Since reading Hannah's testimony so much more is clear to me. Now I think I understand his questions in a way that I didn't before. He liked to ask me, and he never tired of asking, what I thought of the person who had taken this photograph. What kind of man might he be? He leant forward, concentrating, and his face still as death itself as it had been when he asked for the truck driver's details.

I looked at the photo, and I thought there could only be one answer. ‘A bad man,' I said, and he eased back in his chair. He turned away.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘But I cannot afford to think that.'

He would disappear in one of his silences so that all I was aware of was the dimness of the office, the closed blinds, the stillness of everything. He shook his head, and when he stopped shaking his head he would sigh heavily. Then he would lean forward and then ease back, and then maybe shake his head one more time. ‘What are we supposed to see? What is it we are supposed to think?'

So with my eyes he got to see what he didn't when in the company of Defoe, though when the three of us went out it was always Defoe's eyes that reported the world back to the blind gentleman. Defoe's were the trusted eyes. I was just an armrest or handrail on those outings. It was up to Defoe to decide what was of interest.

When it was just me and the blind gentleman we went to the cemetery. Defoe came twice, the first time so he could be shown the headstones. When it was just the two of us the blind gentleman hardly paid the headstones any attention. All he was interested in was his wife, Hannah.